


The Artist's Escape

by CradleD, VomitCenter



Category: Original Work
Genre: Content approved by SCAR, Escape, Murder, Mystery, Older Characters, Other, Plot Twists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:15:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26910499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CradleD/pseuds/CradleD, https://archiveofourown.org/users/VomitCenter/pseuds/VomitCenter
Summary: Donny's an artist looking for something to take his mind off his struggles, so he tries a special escape room his friend recommended.  Little does he know, this escape room has more than just tricks lying in wait for him...
Relationships: None
Comments: 3
Collections: Sin Corps





	The Artist's Escape

The sign for the escape room loomed over Donny as he stood and looked at it. Big yellow letters in the Times New Roman font proclaimed, “The Artist’s Escape.” 

The one-story building sat in line with five other shops along the street, which was adjacent to the town mall. Tiny cracks populated the bricks that surrounded the cool, glass door. Donny would have thought the cracks were fake, if not for the worm that popped out of one of them. 

Shrugging his shoulders, he pushed open the door and walked in. No one sat behind the front desk, so he rang the bell on the corner of the desk and waited patiently in one of the chairs. A coffee table in front of him carried a few magazines. He picked one up and leafed through the pages while he waited.

He thought the escape room sounded like a dumb puzzle game but his friend, Pam, made it sound fun. She was the one who convinced him to quit his position at Dreamworks. 

He was on the verge of quitting for a while, especially ever since John became the new editor. The man was a complete dictator, a complete unjustified one-eighty from his personality when he was another storyboard artist like the rest of them. 

Donny liked his position as head storyboard artist, but John’s constant demands left him feeling drained almost every day. Pam couldn’t take it anymore after the first couple of weeks after John took over; she walked out without even clearing out her desk. 

Donny held on to the hope that John would go back to his old self for a few more weeks. However, after a talk with Pam over drinks, Donny knew he couldn't make himself happy at his current job. He cleared out his desk the next day. 

Barbera was another influence on his decision to quit animation. He had visited her grave on the morning he quit and asked her. He felt her steer him in the right direction. Ever since brain cancer took her from him a couple of years back, he felt as though she was still with him, guiding his hand. 

Barb always seemed to know exactly what to say to him whenever he had a question about anything. He could still remember the last thing she said to him.

“Follow your own road.”

Tears threatened to come to Donny’s eyes, as they always did when those words appeared in his head. Then, footsteps from down the hall snapped him out of his trance. He looked up to see a pudgy man with a sleepy look on his face. 

“Hey, there,” he began. “You here by yourself?”

Donny cleared his throat and said, “Yeah.” He stood up and stumbled to the front desk. “How much?”

“Thirty dollars per person.”

Donny forked over some bills he wrenched from his pocket and watched as the clerk punched the payment into a small computer. Finished, the man looked up and said, “Alrighty. You’re all set. Ever done an escape room before?”

“No.”

“Oh, you’ll have a fun time, then. Normally these are supposed to be done in groups, but this one we made special for solos.” A smirk appeared on the pudgy man’s face that contrasted his lazy demeanor, making Donny raise an eyebrow in suspicion.

“What? Do I get a cookie if I finish in time?” Donny bluntly asked, not sure what this guy was implying by ‘special for solos’. Pudgy smiled at him again, “Something like that.” 

He led Donny down the hall to the entrance and explained the rules to him. He could not ask for hints, as they would appear on the screen. If he ever wanted to be let out, he need only say the password, “Noodles”, and they would let him out. 

A buzzer would sound when time was up and if he wasn’t out yet, he would have to accept defeat. Carl, the pudgy man’s name, would come in and get him if he wasn’t out before all the time had elapsed. He had three hours to escape. “Any questions?”

“No, everything seems pretty straight forward,” Donny said.

“Alright,” The man opened the door to a pitch-black room. “Go on in… if you dare.”

Donny scoffed and stepped into the darkness. Carl shut the door as Donny stepped inside, erasing the last rays of light, plunging him into total darkness. Donny felt suspended in mid-air, unable to see or hear anything. Then, lights flickered on overhead, illuminating the room. It was a square room, with four walls equally spaced. 

In the center of the room was a chair and a desk with a computer. Donny walked forward and sat down in the chair. As he sat, the computer monitor switched on, the screen white. Black letters appeared on the screen as though someone was typing them on the other end.

“Draw me a nose.” the screen said.

“W-What?” Donny looked around, confused, until he saw a drawer underneath the desk. He pulled out the drawer to find a piece of computer paper and an HB pencil inside. Seeing that there was enough space on the desk for the paper and the keyboard, Donny put the paper on the desk and did as the screen instructed. He went for a simple, three-quarter view nose, nothing special. He wasn’t prepared to draw anything realistic. 

“No.” the screen said when Donny finished. “Draw me a nose.”

Donny paused and looked at his drawing. Figuring that the screen wanted something more realistic, he began to draw again. As he finished and lifted his pencil from the paper, a sharp pain rose from his ankles. He grunted and looked down. Iron shackles fixed his ankles to the legs of the chair. “Hey, what hell is this?”” he panicked. He swiveled his head around, trying to look for a clue before returning his eyes to the screen.

“Try again,” said the black letters on the white screen.

A bead of sweat formed on Donny’s brow. He smirked and thought, This must be a joke. “If it is, it’s not very funny,” he said aloud. Not knowing what else to do, he simply drew another nose. He tried to make this one as realistic as possible, taking his time with the shapes and forms, even making sure to draw visible pores. When he finished, the shackles opened and a key dropped onto the desk. He looked back at the screen, which said, 

“That’s more like it.”

Donny picked up the key and saw a door directly in front of him. He was sure that he hadn’t seen the door before, but shrugged the thought away and walked toward it, happy to have a way out. Slipping the key into the socket, he hesitated, not knowing what might be on the other side. Swallowing hard, he swung open the door and peered inside. 

Flickering fluorescence from the ceiling lights filled the room in faint strobes. The room was shaped like a wide L. A bench sat on the wall to Donny’s left. A frame depicting flowers hung on the right wall. 

He stepped slowly inside. Without warning, the door swung shut behind him on its own, making Donny jump. He swung around and looked at the door, a frightened expression on his face. 

‘Alright now, don’t be a pussy.’ he thought. These stunts were obviously meant to scare him and, he had to admit, they were clever, despite being cheap parlor tricks.

I walked down the room and rounded the corner of the L-shape. There was a woman on another bench on the opposite wall. She sat quietly, barely moving or breathing. Her skin was pale as a linen sheet. Her long curled black hair draped over her face, covering her eyes. Velvet lips peeked from under the thick strands. 

The sight of her made Donny shiver.

He stayed on the wall as he finished rounding the corner. There was another computer on the far wall, adjacent to the one the woman sat against. Donny looked back and forth between the computer and the woman, trying to decide what to do next. Peeling his back off the wall, he crouched slightly and approached the woman, waving his hand in front of his face. 

“Hello?” He tried interacting with her. She said nothing, nor would she move.

Puzzled, Donny stared at her a moment. A loud beep from the computer to his right made him jump. He swiveled his head right and saw words appear on the monitor, now brightly lit. This time, green letters appeared on a pitch-black background. 

An old 90s movie came to his mind. Donny walked closer to the monitor to read the message.

“Leave her alone. She won’t do anything. Sit down.”

Donny looked back at the woman, reluctant to trust the computer’s words. She sat still, barely breathing. Deciding he didn’t have much of a choice, Donny pulled his apprehensive eyes away from the woman and sat down at the small desk. He checked underneath and, sure enough, there was a drawer with a pencil and paper inside. 

He pulled them out and lay them on the desk, prepared for the inevitable.

“Draw me the love of your life.”

Donny stared at the screen, his pencil loose in his hand. ‘What the fuck is this?’ he thought. Before he could move a muscle, iron shackles clamped around his ankles again, as if predicting that he would get up and ask to leave. He looked down, breathing hard with fear. 

“What the fuck?” he said aloud this time. He looked around to try and find a camera. There were none. He looked behind him and saw the woman sitting in the same spot. Only there was a key difference. Her head was tilted in Donny’s direction, though her hair still covered her face. 

She was looking at him.

Fighting to stay calm, Donny looked back at the screen and saw the message on the screen change. “Didn’t I tell you not to worry about her? Just ignore any kind of moves she makes. She won’t do anything. You’re not getting out of this room without drawing the ‘love of your life’ so you might as well pick that pencil back up off the ground and do what I told you.”

Trembling, Donny reached for his pocket and realized with dismay that he left his phone in the car. He didn’t want to start thinking in the 911 emergency realm, but feeling the phone in his pocket would have comforted him. Without his phone, he felt vulnerable, isolated, and alone. Hopeless. Amazed that the absence of the small device could make him feel so many things at once, Donny bent down in his chair and picked up the pencil. 

He breathed deeply and slowly, then looked at the paper. 

The love of his life could be no one other than Barbera, so he decided to draw her as he remembered her. Taking another breath, he touched his pencil to the paper and drew.

The drawing took him little more than an hour. A good pose and image of her face populated his mind, and he drew it as though she were standing right in front of him. When he finished, he looked at the drawing for a moment, taking in Barbera’s image. She was smiling, laughing slightly, her hands folded just under her breasts as though she were protecting a growing fetus. 

Donny noticed a wet spot form on her arm that bled the soft graphite into her breast. He looked up as he noticed more tears fall down his cheeks. Breathing in, he wiped the tears from his eyes, not knowing why he was crying. He looked back at the screen. His eyes widened at the message he saw:

“Is that how you felt about Barbera when she was on her deathbed and you couldn’t even look at her? Don’t think we have any kind of sympathy for you. We know exactly how pathetic you are.”

Icy fingers closed around Donny’s throat. Sharp nails dug into his trachea, restricting his windpipe and drawing blood. He gasped and clutched at his throat. 

Death held him in its cold grasp. He kicked his legs violently, raising the desk from the ground with every blow it took from Donny’s feet. He tried to turn his head, but the hands kept his neck fixed so he couldn’t move. Air bubbled in his lungs, attempting to escape his sealed throat. 

Darkness blotted his sight, decreasing the light by the second. As his consciousness slipped away, he felt his body lean back in the chair. His heart pounded and his eyes widened at the sight of the woman’s face above him. It was Barbera. 

Her hair, blacker than he remembered, crowned her pale face, which was scrunched in a piercing glare. The resurrected Barbera poured her hate into his eyes as she choked him, pulling him into the darkness. His mind yielded, and darkness blanketed his world…

Donny woke up in a blue room. He sat up and looked around. 

He was on the floor. The room looked padded, like a cell in an asylum or a jail. Something felt wrong. He looked down and realized his clothes changed. He now wore a white, long sleeve shirt with faded brown pants. Someone must have hidden his casual clothes somewhere. 

A beep moved Donny’s gaze to the center of the room. A desk with a monitor sat in the middle of the room, like the first room he entered. 

The monitor lit up and blue words appeared on a black screen. “Stand up.” Donny did as the monitor ordered.

He walked toward the desk and sat in the chair. He shook his legs expecting shackles to appear, but they did not. More words appeared on the screen.

“Draw me your worst nightmare.”

Donny’s mind blanked. He couldn’t think of what that could possibly be. Barbera appeared in his mind again. 

Nothing worse than her death haunted his dreams, so that is what he decided to draw. 

He pulled out the compartment under the desk and removed the pencil and paper he knew were there from instinct. Laying them on the desk, he started drawing, almost without thinking. The picture that he drew frightened him more with every line he put down, but he couldn’t stop. As if something grabbed his hand and forced it to continue marking the paper, he kept drawing. 

The image that populated on the paper shocked and terrified him. He wanted to scream, but could not pull his focus away from drawing. When he finished, he put the pencil down and stared at the paper in horror.

Barbera lay in a pool of blood that oozed from a gaping hole in her throat. She lay face up in front of an open doorway, a man darkening the light that attempted to peak into the room. The man held a knife in his right hand, blood dripping from the blade. Donny bent down to get a closer look at the man’s face.

Then he realized the man he drew was himself. He screamed.

He screamed until his throat scratched his vocal chords. He screamed until the pain of what he saw burned in his mind. He screamed until he could not take anymore and pushed the drawing off the desk. Breathing hard, he buried his face in his hands, fighting to erase the image he drew from his mind. The drawing remained etched on the surface of his brain. He thought it was all he could see even when he opened his eyes and saw words on the monitor.

“Why are you so shocked to see what happened? Don't you remember what you did? You’re so pathetic you can’t even admit it to yourself. What makes you think you deserve to live. You”

Donny refused to read more after that. He grabbed the monitor and, with a burst of strength, wrenched it off the desk on which it was fastened. He threw the monitor to the corner of the room. Then, he ran to that corner, picked the monitor up, and threw it again. 

He repeated throwing the monitor across the room until he saw it shatter to pieces. Panting, he staggered to where he thought a door in the room might be and pounded on the padded surface. 

“Let me out!” he screamed. “I’m not playing this fucking game anymore. You guys are sick! You hear me!” He pounded harder and harder on the wall. He kept pounding until he could no longer feel his fists. Then, he continued pounding.

“Let me out!! Let me out!!” 

“LetmeoutletmeoutLETMEOUTLETMEOUTLETMEOUTLETMEOUT……”

Donny woke up screaming. He couldn’t move his arms, and he thrashed against the straitjacket. Large men in white t-shirts grabbed him and held him down on the bed as he tried to get up. He kept screaming “Let me out! Let me out!” at the top of his lungs. A new voice silenced him.

“You know we can’t do that, Donny.”

A woman in a tight suit appeared in the room. She wore thin glasses and had a tired expression on her face. She looked at Donny with sad eyes. “Do you remember who I am?” she said. 

“My name is Pam, remember? I’m your therapist.” Donny looked at her in disbelief. He could not believe what he was seeing and hearing. 

“What are you talking about?” he said. “Where am I?”

Pam sighed. “We went through this yesterday, Donny. You’re in Derwent’s Center for Behavioral Health. You agreed in court to come here and seek help after…what happened with your wife…Do you remember what happened to your wife?”

“She died of fucking cancer!” Donny said. “How could I not remember, you idiot!”

“No, Donny…you killed her. You stabbed her in the throat ten times with your kitchen knife… remember?”

Memories flooded Donny’s mind. Everything that happened flashed before him all at once. He remembered that night like it was yesterday. He remembered how tired he was after quitting his job at Dreamworks. He felt like he had made the biggest mistake of his life, but also the most freeing decision of his life at the same time. He could not understand how he felt. 

Barbera was there as always to comfort him. She asked him what happened and he told her. That’s when she said it.

“Follow your own road.”

Something snapped inside him when he heard those words. He grabbed the kitchen knife and buried it in Barbera’s throat. He stabbed her again and again until he saw the light leave her eyes. When he stood back up, he stared at his dead wife for a moment before bursting into tears. Shortly afterwards, he called 911. 

Tears fell down his face as he remembered everything. “B… Bar… Barb…” He could not bear the thought of what he had done. He shook his head and tried to block the images out, but they wouldn’t leave. Something pinched his neck and sleep tugged at his mind. 

“Don’t worry, Donny,” Pam said. “We’ll take care of you. Just go back to sleep. We start treatment tomorrow.” 

Pam’s voice soothed him as he drifted into a sea of darkness.

**Author's Note:**

> If you would like to have Early Access for Fiction from SCAR consider becoming a beta reader for SCAR or even a collaborator if you have writing experience.
> 
> http://tiny.cc/NI0W44


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